Footwear - Leather - PPE Industry News & Articles

Paris, France - This month, Desolina Suter has joined the Première Vision team as fashion director.  Of dual French/Italian origin, she is an expert in materials, colours and trends, and has been Première Vision’s fashion correspondent in Italy for nearly 15 years. She will be in charge of coordinating the Premi&e ...more

Obituary: Nigel Plumpton - CNB Industries (29/04/1949-29/10/2021) ...more

Obituary: Chris Bezuidenhout - The Cross Trainer (11/12/1951-16/12/2021) Johannesburg, Gauteng, SA - Frame Leisure Trading, T/A The Cross Trainer, is saddened to announce the passing of its beloved General Manager, Chris Bezuidenhout.   “Chris spearheaded many businesses, with the inclusion of taking our company and facili ...more

Durban, KZN, SA - Ron arrived in the then Rhodesia from Scotland as a schoolboy. He kept his Scottish accent throughout his life, which I teased him about.      I met him in the late 1960s when he was one of Bata's retail shop managers in the then Salisbury. Through various promotions, he became retail personnel m ...more

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, headquartered in Germany, describes itself as the world’s leading applied research organization, and we frequently carry its reports in S&V Footwear & Leather Goods' sister publication, S&V Protect. This report, however, is pertinent for all our publications. ...more

Footwear industry: double-digit recovery in 2021 (turnover +16.2% over 12 months, according to the earliest projections) despite a -10 to -15% gap compared to 2019. Recovery is uneven: the big names are making great progress, while 2 out of 3 companies close the year with revenues below pre-Covid levels. Uncertainty is caused by a fresh o ...more

Deborah Taylor, MD of the Sustainable Leather Foundation, took part in a Bangladesh International Investment Summit in November. Here she writes about the summit and visits to tanneries and leather goods and footwear manufacturers. ...more

The product called E-Leather by the company that makes it (it stands for 'leather evolved' or 'engineered leather' - really?) or Fly Leather by Nike, is one of the synthetic products which incorporates leather waste. But the claim that it is therefore more environmentally acceptable than leather doesn't hold up. ...more

South Africa's 2 automotive leather tanneries have reacted with scepticism to a report by Market Growth Reports which paints a picture of 'steady growth' for automotive leather globally over the next 5 years. ...more

Fraunhofer researchers have collaborated with partners to develop a platform to remove weeds fully automatically. The mobile AMU-Bot robot system navigates using optical sensors and removes weeds mechanically without the need for chemicals. ...more

Mossel Bay, W. Cape, SA - We pay tribute to a legend in the ostrich industry and the ‘father’ of the SCOT tannery, Pieter Yzelle, who sadly passed away on 11 November 2021. The tannery is a monument to Pieter’s technical and managerial ability as well as his tenacity to reach his goals. ...more

Financed by its social impact programme, Stellenbosch University is investigating a fish skin tanning project to assist jobless people in nearby coastal communities. ...more

SGS, the French-based testing, inspection and certification company, has joined Sustainable Leather Foundation (SLF) as a Contributing Partner! ...more

Internationally, leather is under fire both from (unfairly, generally speaking) the animal welfare lobby and (with much more justification in some instances) the environmental lobby. In Europe, which is the epicentre of anti-leather sentiment, individuals and companies in the leather industry have responded by creating bodies to both educate the public of leather's bona fides and to encourage the leather industry to live up to those expectations. ...more

Himo Town/Area Moshi, Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania - The response from Leather Association of Tanzania executive secretary Freddy Silvester Kabala to our questions for the feature on sheep and goat skins leathers in the last issue arrived too late for inclusion. Here are his answers: ...more

When asked if the starting number digits of a dataset have equal chances of being there, the average person will say yes. That is in a collection of data the number digits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 could appear, if equal, 11.1% of the time. Why wouldn’t they appear with equal randomness? So, to test this world hypothesis, data scientists, over 90 years, tried to show that digits in a data number set would appear 11.1% of the time. ...more

Generally speaking, the lighter it is, the more it costs. This is the second in a series of articles on bullet resistant vests by Deon du Plessis, MD of Bullet Proofing Technology (Pty) Ltd, in which he outlines the soft and hard materials which go into BRVs. His business manufactures a wide range of body armour plates and vehicle armour, and supplies a number of other bullet resistant vest manufacturers. ...more

The NRCS needs to do what it's supposed to do - Sourcing from China hasn't been a problem - Swing to lower priced boots, but demand is good. ...more

Q&A with Ndlela Mazibuko, BBF Safety Group sales manager ...more

To start, we’d like to acknowledge the work the NRCS is doing with regards to safety footwear and the PPE categories they regulate. The enormity of the task is sometimes overlooked but, taking into account that safety footwear only came into the NRCS portfolio a few years ago, it is still a relatively new category for them with an exhaustive number of both local and imported styles to consider. ...more